Scoring Sunday's Nuptials: From Blogger to Bride in 31 Days

Blogging will inevitably keep me isolated and alone from the rest of the world forever. But in this week's NYT Weddings & Celebrations, Weddings Expert Phyllis Nefler notes someone who blogged themselves to happy matrimony! *Cries in fetal position.*

Want a boyfriend? Start a blog! It worked for Tamara Duricka, who had her own personal Year of Magical Thinking at age 30 when she suffered two breakups and the death of her dog. Wanting "a gimmick" to "pull herself out of a funk," she did what any early thirtysomething with creeping malaise and a career in media would.

She started a blog.

Called "31 Dates in 31 Days" (and hosted on Blogspot, natch) Duricka's project involved going on 31 dates in 31 days. Because this was not 'Nam, this was dating, there were rules:

Each date lasts at least 31 minutes.
Each date costs less than $31.
Dates will take place in a public setting.
No drugs.
No alcohol (Yes, seriously. None.)
No married men.
AND… date #31 (Valentine's Day) will be a second date!

Faced with these dealbreaking set of restrictions, it should come as no surprise to any of you that the man who ultimately wiggled his way into the Valentine's Day second date was … a Mormon. (Which reminds me, by the way: there was not nearly enough Sarah in last week's Big Love, and I hear she is not really going to be in the show much this season. Is this true? This is really upsetting. Also, how hot is Ben getting?)

And "about 70 dates later," Duricka found herself engaged. Julia Allison, there's hope for you yet! Time to revive that 24 dates in 24 hours thing that never happened!

But a word of warning: despite hoping to turn her blog into a book, Duricka has yet to find a publisher. Might I suggest HarperStudio?

Back in ancient history, before people wrote anonymous blogs, they were just dudes with pen names. Like this father of the bride, who landed a column in Esquire magazine under his pseudonym of Stanley Bing while climbing the corporate ladder at CBS in his day job under his real name, Gil Schwartz. ("Since then, he has also written for newspapers, a cigar magazine, Seventeen and, most recently Fortune, current home of Bing's monthly business column." Man, I miss Old Media sometimes!) Anyway, he climbed the corporate ladder pretty high: he's now the chief communications officer for CBS. Meanwhile, here I am blogging on Gawker—under the name of a Shelley Long character in a roundly-panned (but cult classic!) Lateighties movie—about Gil-Stanley Schwartz-Bing's daughter Nina getting married to a Google employee. This, folks, is progress.

The featured couple this week is really attractive and nice-seeming. I really like the bride's veil-hairnet thing, and they are one of those great opposites-attract pairs: she's a Quaker girl who used to pose so her parents could sculpt her, and is now a NBC anchor who wakes up at 2:30 every morning; he, a "wild-sounding cousin" of her friend who "wore earrings, listened to hip-hop, had lots of girlfriends, did flips on snowboards and persuaded his father, Eric S. Nathan, to put a trampoline in the living room."

Aren't they cute? When the groom wanted to ask her parents for permission to marry her, he fooled them at first by saying he needed a loan. And the dad opened his checkbook and everything! It's like that thing in A Bronx Tale about reaching over and opening the car door, kind of.

Maybe not. Here, read this paragraph and feel happy.

Once they started dating, Ms. Low and other friends began noticing some changes in Mr. Nathan. He invited people over for wine and cheese, for instance, instead of brownies from a box. "Erika was the first girl who made him nervous," Ms. Low said.

May we all find the one who makes us nervous. What's the Quaker equivalent of mazel tov? Oh, probably complete silence.

Elsewhere, some well-intentioned parents tried to set their friends' 24-year old aspiring comedienne daughter up with their 29-year old son, but the plans backfired when she ended up with his 38-year old brother instead; if I were this couple I would see how many structures at the Lapidus family summer camps I could christen (come on, the ceramics studio?); and if I may offer a bit of constructive criticism to Alexandra Johnson, Harvard graduate-cum-"store planning analyst in Manhattan for J. Crew": this is a photo I took of your SoHo store last year; as you can see, it is indistinguishable from a photo of my hall closet. Get your shit together, sister!

This week's matchup:

Margaret Ashton Bensfield, Edward Matthew Sullivan

• The wedding was officiated by an Episcopal priest: +1
• The bride graduated from Vanderbilt and received a master's degree in French from Middlebury College: +1
• The groom graduated from Duke and received an MBA from Harvard: +4
• The bride's mother is named "Llewellyn W. Bensfield" and she is "a trustee of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation": +2
• Both fathers are partners in Washington law firms named "Miller & Chevalier" and "Williams and Connolly": +2

TOTAL: 10

Allison Kay Deutermann and Robert Thomas Dennis

• The bride is keeping her name: -1
• The bride graduated magna cum laude from Penn and the groom graduated magna cum laude from Harvard: +13
• The bride received a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature at Columbia: +1
• The groom received a master's degree in creative writing from Florida State: +0 [Ed. What, no love for Keith Gessen?]
• The groom works at Bridgewater but is "also a poet whose work has appeared in the Paris Review, Fence, and Tin House": +1
• The bride's mother taught elementary school: +1
• The groom's father "retired as a career counselor with the University of Phoenix" (isn't that school online? Please tell me his dad just posted job descriptions to chat rooms!): +1